When they added Theo and fascist, I thought it added something different to the game. Maybe we could use another government addition or two? The bonuses and recent restart changes have added a new twist. (Or when they added oil)

The thing with games, people get bored when the game is tedious. I play MW3, and I am bored as fluff with it. I'm waiting on the new maps. Then I'll be entertained for awhile. You need to add something new every so often. And I am not talking about a patch or hot fix.

This might not have anything to do with what Hanlong is talking about, so sorry. lol

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PDM FTW!

An oiler government or a bigger oil change to fascist so that oiler is a viable strat where people will go for it even if there isn't a server war going on

get bots with a lot of land
like 20000 of them. So until every smart game dev in this game got there brains together and do something. I can be farming them bots and then figure out a way to take control of them and hit all other tags like a devil dictator!

Hmm interesting read.

I guess my problem with earth is there are not enough alliances to make this game enjoyable for my tastes. Your limited on what you can do really....with both war or political actions.

Perhaps putting a hard cap on the size of your alliance so you won't have 50,60 70,80 member alliances and instead a bunch of like 25 member alliances running around would really spice up the game heh.

btw sorry for topping a 1 year old post, i just found it deja vu again

It's all about the numbers and a 'storyline'. I have been banging on about this for 6 months + literally to this board's earthly brick wall it seems.

BOT BOTS BOTS. You could dump $100k in an advertising budget to market this game to a targeted audience and have them come, create an account and within a week they'd leave... Why? Cause unless they tag up straight away to a larger alliance they are farmed into the ground and not let up.

Solution? Bots. This game is so scripted its not funny, I am a web designer / developer and we develop web apps using LAMP at our agency. We have 2 PHP engineers here and reakon it's not that hard to do. I would be willing to offer my time, and even pay for our developer to code out a bunch of strategies for Bots. They don't need to be marked bots, heck even put them in new created alliances... Perhaps build out the GDI as an alliance.

The whole retal thing could be the same, as a human based strategy. If there too big don't retal, create an odd script who acts like a bit of a rogue, if he's hit and the country is more than 2 x his size, send a missile. Let's stop fart assing around and actually DO IT. New players could join and still not be farmlanded to the ground and want to leave. Wars would still happen as the same alliances would still want to control blah blah and backstabbing is always going to happen with online egos.

New players would join, play along, and if they ponder why there not as big, or see other alliances they can join in game etc as we do now. It's a BIG juicy clear WIN WIN.

Second recommendation again is a STORYLINE: It sounds gay, could be gay. But at the moment the storylines are played out between alliances on their own chats, forums and the AT gets a little glimpse of it. It would be great to have the storyline in ALLIANCE server somewhat commentated professionally. To actually document the set's activities for everyone to read, and get involved in. The game is fantasy, there is no animation. So why not build on that...

Just my two cents, but you know i'm right. I think if both those things were implemented we wouldn't need to integrate with facebook.

In previous posts people talk about the sheer amount of time people invest in this game. People have grown up around this game, and the friendships have grown outside the game also.

Well why not invest in it? It's selfishly going to benefit you with all the time you invest in the game... </rant>

and you are right xin, we used to have more countries and alliances so it was harder to map everything out.

with a smaller sample set it's much easier to find algorithms and do things like monte carlo simulations in quick enough time to get the data you want.

i guess with enough complexity and more alliances/countries it will take much longer for a normal home computer to compute all the data in quick enough time for it to be usable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

read that wikipedia article as an example.

heuristically i have wrote tools using the monte carlo method to figure out a lot of things people wouldn't normally guess by hand.

How do you model alliance-alliance interactions? Markov chains?

hanlong,d00d you got WAY too much free time.
Spend some outside or sumpin'.
The real prob with this server is just a lack of players.
When/if they open it to FB it will fix itself.

i do spend time outside =) im just barey sleeping lately :(

detmer: nah i dont use markov chains or any modeling for that... alliance-alliance interactions aren't THAT complicated ;P

maybe it is ;P but i was referring to other things...

LOL you really use simulations to figure out this game? that sounds way too much like my work...MCMC algorithms mmm

i probably have more code for EE tools that i wrote in the past year than the actual code for EE itself :P

@hanlong: randomness is good. However only to the point where it doesn't diminish the strategy element of the game.
However I think that doing something like changing gs to kill between a% and b% (randomly) of a countries population is better than a constant percentage. Perhaps making most elements of the game somewhat random (like exploring is) would help.
The other possible solution is to add in other stuff to make elements much harder to track. I can devise some non random formulas that 99% of the people here would not be able to approximate with any kind of useful accuracy and then you trow in a small random factor:P The question is will people simply hate that kind of thing? Not sure.

Also giving a range of possible stuff to a restart might be more interesting although I"m not sure about that one.